A Language for Quantifying Quantum Network Behavior
Additional information
Authors
Buckley A.,
Chuprikov P.,
Otoni R.,
Soulé R.,
Rand R.,
Eugster P. T.
Type
Journal Article
Year
2025
Language
English
Abstract
Quantum networks have capabilities that are impossible to achieve using only classical information. They connect quantum capable nodes, with their fundamental unit of communication being the
Bell pair
, a pair of entangled quantum bits. Due to the nature of quantum phenomena, Bell pairs are fragile and difficult to transmit over long distances, thus requiring a network of repeaters along with dedicated hardware and software to ensure the desired results. The intrinsic challenges associated with quantum networks, such as competition over shared resources and high probabilities of failure, require quantitative reasoning about quantum network protocols. This paper develops PBKAT, an expressive language for specification, verification and optimization of quantum network protocols for Bell pair distribution. Our language is equipped with primitives for expressing probabilistic and possibilistic behaviors, and with semantics modeling protocol executions. We establish the properties of PBKAT’s semantics, which we use for quantitative analysis of protocol behavior. We further implement a tool to automate PBKAT’s usage, which we evaluated on real-world protocols drawn from the literature. Our results indicate that PBKAT is well suited for both expressing real-world quantum network protocols and reasoning about their quantitative properties.
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Volume
9
Number ( Month )
OOPSLA2
Pages (or article number)
2367-2395
ISSN
2475-1421
DOI
Diffusion
License
License undefined
Visibility
Private
